1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an image forming method, an image forming program, and an image forming apparatus.
2. Description of Related Art
In recent years, there have been various printers, copiers and the likes which can perform a tab printing function to insert tab paper desired positions in a printed document with a plurality of pages and print a letter string and such on a tab of the tab paper. Use of this tab printing function saves user's trouble of inserting tab paper into specific positions in a printed document or writing an index on a tab by hand, thereby improving user-friendliness in creating a printed document with tab paper.
However, printing necessary amount of information in a tab with a generally small area, involves user's troubles of giving precise instruction regarding settings on character size, font, the number of letters and so forth. This problem becomes more prominent as the number of tabs to be inserted into a document is larger, and the area of each tab is smaller.
In this respect, Unexamined Publication No. 2004-199359 discloses a printer which is capable of scanning the information on the tab where an index should be printed, and making use of the scanned information to generate and print an index image with a scale-up or scale-down size. This technique enables a printer to automatically reduce the size of the index which will not fit into the tab, and ensures that the index will be printed on the tab in its entirety. However, the printed index according to this technique may be made illegible due to excessive reduction in its size.
Unexamined Publication No. 2003-260843 also discloses an image forming apparatus comprising a control unit capable of identifying the maximum number of characters that can be printed within a printable area of a tab, in order to stop printing an index with a number of characters beyond the maximum number. However, this technique can only prohibits a printer from printing an index with a size which can not fit into a tab, and still involves user's trouble of repeating change of settings on character size and so forth, in order to achieve desired printing results.
The present invention is made to solve the abovementioned problems of the prior art, and it is an object of the present invention to provide an image forming method, an image forming program, and an image forming apparatus provided with a tab printing function to print desired information on tab paper in an illegible and intact manner, without involving user in troublesome settings.